War,
pestilence, even climate change, are trifles by comparison. Destroy the soil
and we all starve

Imagine a
wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of climate breakdown, no
loss of freshwater,
no antibiotic resistance, no obesity crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely,
then, we would be out of major danger? Sorry. Even if everything else were
miraculously fixed, we’re finished if we don’t address an issue considered so
marginal and irrelevant that you can go for months without seeing it in a
newspaper.

It’s
literally and – it seems – metaphorically, beneath us. To judge by its absence
from the media, most journalists consider it unworthy of consideration. But all
human life depends on it. We knew this long ago, but somehow it has been
forgotten. As a Sanskrit text written
in about 1500BC noted: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband
it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with
beauty. Abuse it and the soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.”

The issue
hasn’t changed, but we have. Landowners around the world are now engaged in an
orgy of soil destruction so intense that, according to the UN’s Food and
Agriculture Organisation, the world on average has just 60 more years of
growing crops. Even in Britain, which is spared the tropical downpours that
so quickly strip exposed soil from the land, Farmers Weekly reports, we have “only 100
harvests left”.

Landowners around the world are now engaged
in an orgy of soil destruction

The
techniques that were supposed to feed the world threaten us with starvation. A paper just
published in the journal Anthropocene analyses the undisturbed sediments in
an 11th-century French lake. It reveals that the intensification of farming
over the past century has increased the rate of soil erosion sixtyfold.

Whenever I
mention this issue, people ask: “But surely farmers have an interest in looking
after their soil?” They do, and there are many excellent cultivators who seek
to keep their soil on the land. There are also some terrible farmers, often
absentees, who allow contractors to rip their fields to shreds for the sake of
a quick profit. Even the good ones are hampered by an economic and political
system that could scarcely be better designed to frustrate them.

This is the International Year of Soils, but you wouldn’t
know it. In January, the Westminster government published a new set of soil standards,
marginally better than those they replaced, but wholly unmatched to the scale
of the problem. There are no penalities for compromising our survival except a
partial withholding of public subsidies. Yet even this pathetic guidance is
considered intolerable by the National Farmers’
Union, which greeted them with bitter complaints. Sometimes the NFU seems
to me to exist to champion bad practice and block any possibility of positive
change.

Few sights
are as gruesome as the glee with which the NFU celebrated the death last year
of the European soil framework directive, the only measure with the potential
to arrest our soil-erosion crisis. The NFU, supported by successive British
governments, fought for eight
years to destroy it, then crowed like a shedful of cockerels
when it won. Looking back on this episode, we will see it as a parable of
our times.

Soon after
that, the business minister, Matthew Hancock,
announced that he was putting “business in charge of driving reform”: trade
associations would be able “to review enforcement of regulation in their
sectors.” The NFU was one the first two bodies granted this privilege. Hancock
explained that this “is all part of our unambiguously pro-business agenda to
increase the financial security of the British people.” But it doesn’t increase
our security, financial or otherwise. It undermines it.

The
government’s deregulation bill,
which has now almost completed its passage through parliament, will force
regulators – including those charged with protecting the fabric of the land –
to “have regard to the desirability of promoting economic growth”. But
short-term growth at the expense of public protection compromises long-term
survival. This “unambiguously pro-business agenda” is deregulating us to death.

There’s no
longer even an appetite for studying the problem. Just one university – Aberdeen
– now offers a degree in soil science. All the rest have been closed down.

This is what
topples civilisations. War and pestilence might kill large numbers of people,
but in most cases the population recovers. But lose the soil and everything
goes with it.

Now,
globalisation ensures that this disaster is reproduced everywhere. In its early
stages, globalisation enhances resilience: people are no longer dependent on
the vagaries of local production. But as it proceeds, spreading the same
destructive processes to all corners of the Earth, it undermines resilience, as
it threatens to bring down systems everywhere.

Short-term growth at the expense of public
protection compromises long-term survival

Almost all
other issues are superficial by comparison. What appear to be great crises are slight
and evanescent when held up against the steady trickling away of our
subsistence.

The
avoidance of this issue is perhaps the greatest social silence of all. Our
insulation from the forces of nature has encouraged a belief in the
dematerialisation of our lives, as if we no longer subsist on food and water,
but on bits and bytes. This is a belief that can be entertained only by people
who have never experienced serious hardship, and who are therefore unaware of
the contingency of existence.

It’s not as
if we are short of solutions. While it now seems that ploughing of any kind is incompatible with the
protection of the soil, there are plenty of means of farming without it.
Independently, in several parts of the world, farmers have been experimenting
with zero-tillage (also known as conservation agriculture), often with
extraordinary results.

There are
dozens of ways of doing it: we need never see bare soil again. But in the UK,
as in most rich nations, we have scarcely begun to experiment with the technique,
despite the best efforts of the magazine Practical Farm Ideas.

Even better
are some of the methods that fall under the heading of permaculture – working with complex natural
systems rather than seeking to simplify or replace them. Pioneers such as Sepp Holzer and Geoff Lawton have
achieved remarkable yields of fruit and vegetables in places that seemed
unfarmable: 1,100m above sea level in the Austrian alps, for example, or in the
salt-shrivelled Jordanian desert.

But, though
every year our government spends £450m on agricultural research
and development – much of it on techniques that wreck our soils – there is
no mention of permaculture either on the websites of the two main funding
bodies (NERC and BBSRC) or in any other department.

The macho
commitment to destructive short-termism appears to resist all evidence and all
logic. Never mind life on Earth; we’ll plough on regardless.

How we ended up paying farmers to flood our homes

The UK government let
the farming lobby rip up the rulebook on soil protection – and now we are
suffering the consequences

It has the
force of a parable.
Along the road from High Ham to Burrowbridge, which skirts Lake Paterson
(formerly known as the Somerset Levels), you can see field after field of
harvested maize. In some places the crop lines run straight down the hill and
into the water. When it rains, the water and soil flash off into the lake.
Seldom are cause and effect so visible.

That's what
I saw on Tuesday. On Friday, I travelled to the source of the Thames. Within
300 metres of the stone that marked it were ploughed fields, overhanging the
catchment, left bare through the winter and compacted by heavy machinery. Muddy
water sluiced down the roads. A few score miles downstream it will reappear in
people's living rooms. You can see the same thing happening across the Thames
watershed: 184 miles of idiocy, perfectly calibrated to cause disaster.

Six weeks
before the floods arrived, a scientific journal called Soil Use and Management
published a paper warning that disaster was brewing. Surface water run-off in
south-west England, where the Somerset Levels are situated, was reaching a
critical point. Thanks to a wholesale change in the way the land is cultivated,
at 38% of the sites the researchers investigated, the water – instead of
percolating into the ground – is now pouring off the fields.

Farmers have
been ploughing land that was previously untilled and switching from spring to
winter sowing, leaving the soil bare during the rainy season. Worst of all is
the shift towards growing maize, whose cultivated area in this country has
risen from 1,400 hectares to 160,000 since 1970.

In three
quarters of the maize fields in the south-west, the soil structure has broken
down to the extent that they now contribute to flooding. In many of these
fields, soil, fertilisers and pesticides are sloshing away with the water. And
nothing of substance, the paper warned, is being done to stop it. Dated:
December 2013.

Maize is
being grown in Britain not to feed people, but to feed livestock and,
increasingly, the biofuel business. This false solution to climate change will
make the impacts of climate change much worse, by reducing the land's capacity
to hold water.

The previous
government also saw it coming. In 2005 it published a devastating catalogue of
the impacts of these changes in land use. As well as the loss of fertility from
the land and the poisoning of watercourses, it warned, "increased run-off
and sediment deposition can also increase flood hazard in rivers". Maize,
it warned, is a particular problem because the soil stays bare before and after
the crop is harvested, without the stubble or weeds required to bind it.
"Wherever possible," it urged, "avoid growing forage maize on
high and very high erosion risk areas."

The Labour
government turned this advice into conditions attached to farm subsidies.
Ground cover crops should be sown under the maize and the land should be
ploughed, then resown with winter cover plants within 10 days of harvesting, to
prevent water from sheeting off. So why isn't this happening in Somerset?

Because the
current government dropped the conditions. Sorry, not just dropped them. It
issued – wait for it – a specific exemption for maize cultivation from all soil
conservation measures.

As the
water runs off the land, it takes the silt with it. Photograph: George Monbiot

It's hard to
get your head round this. The crop which causes most floods and does most
damage to soils is the only one which is completely unregulated.

When soil
enters a river we call it silt. A few hundred metres from where the soil is
running down the hills, a banner over the River Parrett shouts: "Stop the
flooding, dredge the rivers." Angry locals assail ministers and officials
with this demand. While in almost all circumstances, dredging causes more
problems than it solves, and though, as even Owen Paterson
admits, "increased dredging of rivers on the Somerset Levels would not
have prevented the recent widespread flooding", there's an argument here
for a small amount of dredging at strategic points.

But to do it
while the soil is washing off the fields is like trying to empty the bath while
the taps are running.

This
satellite image, taken on 16 February, shows where our soil goes once it's
washed off our fields. Photograph: Dundee Satellite Receiving Station

So why did
government policy change? I've tried asking the environment department: they're
as much use as a paper sandbag. But I've found a clue. The farm regulation task
force demanded a specific change: all soil protection rules attached to farm
subsidies should become voluntary. They should be downgraded from a legal
condition to an "advisory feature". Even if farmers do nothing to
protect their soil, they should still be eligible for public money.

You might
have entertained the naive belief that in handing out billions to wealthy
landowners we would get something in return. Something other than endless
whining from the National Farmers' Union. But so successfully has policy been
captured in this country that Defra – which used to stand for the Department
for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs – now means Doing Everything Farmers'
Representatives Ask. We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our
wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our
sitting rooms flooded.

Yes, it's a
parable all right, a parable of human folly, of the kind that used to end with
300 cubits of gopher wood and a journey to the mountains of Ararat.
Antediluvian? You bet it is.

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The 300 million year old screw that has researchers scratching their
heads

There
are numerous archaeological discoveries that science cannot understand, we have come across
countless findings that have ended up as being just that, findings that have
caught the attention of researchers, but have yet to be accurately explained.

In
this case we have a screw that according to researchers is 300 million years
old, and like many awkward discoveries in the past, it was found in
Russia in the ‘90s.

Russian
scientists found it by chance actually, as they were performing analysis after
the fall of a meteorite in the Kaluga region when they came across a mysterious
object that resembled a modern day screw. Scientists were baffled and did not
know what to think of it. Did it come from space? Is this screw proof of
ancient civilizations that inhabited Earth millions of years ago? What is it?

The
fossil surrounding the screw has around 2 cm long. It was discovered in a
scientific expedition that was performed by a group called the Kosmopoisk
group, which is a scientific research group responsible for conducting UFO
related research, cryptozoological research and paranormal science. Initially
they suited up and went to search for the remains of the meteorite that
impacted the Kaluga region in Russia. Suddenly, they came across the screw, and
incredibly, after paleontological analysis, it turned out that the age of the
"stone" was somewhere between 300 and 320 million years.

The
artifact was analyzed using X-Ray technology, which provided researchers with
another shock; it turned out that another screw was present inside it. Many
scientists have tried explaining the origin and details of the
"screw", some have proposed that it could be the remains of a
Crinoids (Marine animals that make up the class Crinoidea of the echinoderms)
This theory was discarded due to the fact that the screw is much larger than
the average size of these animals.

The
theories as to what this object is are pillage up. Skeptics are having a field
day and they love to debunk discoveries like this one, offering a much simpler
answer, suggesting that its nothing, probably the remains of an old factory,
vehicle, or anything else that can make you, the reader look elsewhere for
answers, without paying much attention to details such as the age, and region
where it was found.

So
what is it? A screw that proves that extraterrestrial life was present on Earth
millions of years ago? Is this screw the remains of an extraterrestrial
vehicle? Or is there a possibility that it might just be evidence of ancient
civilizations in the past that possessed very advanced technology? All of these
options are still possibilities as we still do not know what this mysterious
artifact really is.

How
is it possible that a screw could have survived a time lapse of 300 million
years? What is its metallic composition? These are several of the questions
that still need to be answered in order to get a full picture of what this
object really is.

In
the meantime, let us know what you think this one might actually be.

Is
this a 300 million-year-old screw or just a fossilized sea creature?

A Russian
research team known as the Kosmopoisk Group, which investigates UFOs and paranormal
activity, claims to have found a one-inch screw embedded inside a rock that is
300 million years old. They say the screw is the remains of an ancient form of
technology that proves extra-terrestrials visited Earth millions of years ago.
However, scientists say the ‘screw’ is nothing more than a fossilized sea
creature called a Crinoid.

The Russian
team were investigating the remains of a meteorite in the Kaluga region of
Russia in the 1990s, when they came across the strange object. A
paleontological analysis was carried out, which revealed the stone was formed
between 300 and 320 million years ago. The team also claim that an x-ray
of the stone shows that another screw is present inside it. However, they have
not allowed international experts to examine the object, nor have they revealed
what the screw is made of.

Since the
initial finding, much debate has surrounded the discovery, with scientists
scoffing at the suggestion that it reflects an ancient screw and suggesting
there is a much less exciting explanation.

Location of Kaluga Oblast in Russia, where
researchers claim to have found a 300-million-year-old screw (Wikipedia)

The Mail Online reports that scientists who have examined
photographic evidence of the object say that there is a more earthly answer to
the phenomenon – the ‘screw’ is actually the fossilized remains of an ancient
sea creature known as a crinoid.

Crinoids are
a species of marine animal that are believed to have evolved around 350 million
years ago. They are characterized by a mouth on the top surface that is
surrounded by feeding arms. Today, there are around 600 crinoid species,
but they were much more abundant and diverse in the past.

Over the
years, geologists have found countless fossils representing whole crinoids or
their segments, some of which do resemble screws. Scientists have suggested
that the screw-like shape seen in fossil samples may be the reversed-shape of
the creature, which dissolved while the rock was shaped around it.

“It is
thought that the fossilised creature in the mysterious rock is a form of ‘sea
lily’ – a type of crinoid that grew a stalk when it became an adult, to tether
itself to the seabed,” write the Mail Online. “However, some say that the
stalks of crinoids were typically much smaller than the ‘screw’, with slightly
different markings, and have discarded the theory.”

Nigel
Watson, author of the UFO Investigations Manual told Mail Online: “Lots of
out-of-place artefacts have been reported, such as nails or even tools embedded
in ancient stone. Some of these reports are…misinterpretations of natural
formations.”

“It would be
great to think we could find such ancient evidence of a spaceship visiting us
so long ago, but we have to consider whether extra-terrestrial spacecraft
builders would use screws in the construction of their craft,” he added. “It
also seems that this story is probably a hoax that is being spread by the
internet, and reflects our desire to believe that extra-terrestrials have visited
us in the past and are still visiting us today in what we now call UFOs.”

For now, the
controversy surrounding the object remains very much alive, and unless the
Kosmopoisk Group releases detailed information regarding the material of the
‘screw’, it is unlikely that consensus will be reached any time soon.

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